Chapter 3 : THREE PARADIGMS FOR VIEWING DECISION BIASES

Decisions can, and do, go wrong: a doctor misdiagnoses a patient's illness; a new product fails in the marketplace; a military commander mistakenly engages a civilian aircraft. Undesirable outcomes, however, do not necessarily imply faulty decision making; consider General Hod's decision to shoot down a Libyan airliner (described at the end of the last chapter). Even though the aircraft turned out not to be on a hostile mission, his conclusion that it was hostile might have been justified by the information he had at the time, by his efforts to gather further relevant data, and by the costs of a terrorist incident. It can also happen, of course, that a bad decision works out well. It is natural, then, for psychologists to look for a way of evaluating the decision itself, or the process that led to the decision, as distinct from its outcomes: to point, for example, at false prior beliefs, inappropriate priorities, shaky inferences from data, or even logical inconsistencies, rather than simply a bad outcome.